The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the French Global Environment Facility (FFEM) have signed a €2 million agreement to fund conservation projects and strengthen the capacities of at least 40 civil society organisations in Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt over five years.
The agreement, signed at COP17 in Yerevan, Armenia, on October 27th, marks the fourth phase of the Small-scale Initiatives Programme for Civil Society in North Africa (PPI-OSCAN), which combines small grants with long-term support including organisational development, technical training, networking and dialogue with public authorities.
Over its first three phases, PPI-OSCAN supported 90 civil society organisations through 110 projects in Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt, protecting species, restoring ecosystems and creating benefits for local communities. The programme, coordinated by IUCN’s Centre for Mediterranean Cooperation (IUCN Med), was launched in 2014 with support from the FFEM and the MAVA Foundation.
The fourth phase places greater emphasis on organisational development, with increased opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, mentoring, knowledge exchange and knowledge management. It will also strengthen the programme’s presence in Egypt, following an initial pilot phase.
The new phase will contribute to strengthening Mubadarat, IUCN Med’s platform for Mediterranean civil society organisations, which brings together PPI-OSCAN and other IUCN programmes to provide CSOs with funding, technical assistance and opportunities to collectively influence public policies. “For this fourth phase, one of our objectives is to support the scaling up of both the solutions and the organisations themselves, which requires diversifying their sources of funding,” said Stéphanie Bouziges-Eschmann, Secretary-General of the FFEM.
The partnership between IUCN Med and FFEM extends beyond PPI-OSCAN to sustainable blue tourism, ecosystem restoration and the fight against plastic pollution. The challenge now is to ensure the new phase builds on the momentum of the first three, turning grassroots conservation into lasting policy influence across North Africa.
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